


you scan the credits for your name

by Anonymous



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-04
Updated: 2019-03-04
Packaged: 2019-11-08 10:32:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,280
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17979644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It's not her divorce lawyer standing there.  It's her business lawyer, pale in a dark blue skirt suit.  She has one of those extendable folders under one arm--an accordion file.  Sometimes words related to music slip her mind, which is odd, considered how devoted she'd been to the Top 40 as a teenager."I shouldn't even have this," Rebecca says, and hands her the file.  "But I thought you ought to know."





	you scan the credits for your name

After The Incident, Allison moves into a hotel suite while she and Patrick start negotiations. He wants a divorce and full custody; she tries to bargain him down to therapy, couples' counseling, then shared custody, then supervised visits. She's in the hotel for about a month in total, and tries to keep busy. She doesn't schedule any new projects or appearances, but keeps the old ones. She reads the scripts her agent sends her for something to do. She works out an hour and a half each day in the hotel's gym. She has conference calls with Claire and Patrick every afternoon, when Claire gets back from kindergarten. Claire always asks when she's coming home. Allison always replies, "It's not that easy, baby," and somehow manages to never break down sobbing.

She drinks, on average, a bottle of vodka each week. It's the perfect amount: enough to make her a little more tired, a little more maudlin, but not enough to make her do something stupid like call up Patrick and say, _I heard a rumor you're calling off the divorce._ She's promised herself: no more using her powers to get her way, especially not with the people she loves. They, or their lawyers, will talk it out like responsible adults.

Which is why she's surprised when, as she's opening the bottle for the week, the phone rings, and the hotel concierge says her lawyer is here to visit her. Allison can't imagine why she would be at this hour, unless Patrick has dropped the filing or made a particularly outrageous demand for spousal support, or--her stomach lurches--doesn't want her to be able to see Claire at all. She takes a sip of the neat vodka, then gets up to open the door.

Even more confusingly, it's not her divorce lawyer standing there. It's her business lawyer, pale in a dark blue skirt suit. She has one of those extendable folders under one arm--an accordion file. Sometimes words related to music slip her mind, which is odd, considered how devoted she'd been to the Top 40 as a teenager.

"I shouldn't even have this," Rebecca says, and hands her the file. "But I thought you ought to know."

"What is this?" Allison takes out a thick sheaf of pages, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred. They're bound together professionally. It doesn't seem like a court filing.

Her lawyer's lips go thin and bloodless. "You'll see. I know you have a lot on your plate, but--"

It's a script, Allison realizes. She's not really looking for work and Rebecca knows this, but then she sees the title: _The Raincoat School._

"Oh," she says. "I'll call you."

Rebecca nods. "Whatever course of action you choose to take, I'll support you."

Allison makes an absent-minded noise of assent. She's already lost in the script.

She'd just given birth to Claire when Vanya's book came out, and so, whether it was the lack of sleep, or the baby bonding hormones, she hadn't let it occupy her, hadn't let herself obsess and rage over it, the way some of her other siblings must have. Allison is certain Diego's furious that Vanya said he was a deeply empathetic young man whom their father had tried to warp into a cold-blooded killer without much success. Mostly the book made Allison sad because she never realized how hurt and lonely Vanya felt, and because she missed her family. Vanya's book isn't very nice, but it isn't entirely wrong.

The script for _The Raincoat School_ is not Vanya's book.

In the script, Luther's head has been grafted onto the corpse of a gorilla. Ben kills Five through a portal accident, and then himself. Allison Rumors all her siblings into loving her, sometimes carnally. There's an explicit sex scene between Vanya and Diego, which is so ridiculous Allison snorts into her vodka. The Eiffel Tower has a secondary role. Klaus is portrayed as whoring himself out to men and women to get drugs. That makes Allison snort again. The last time she saw Klaus was her wedding, when he stole silverware from the venue and pawned it to buy drugs—and he told her he’d do it, he told her when he was doing it, he told her after he did it (as it turned out, the silverware wasn’t exactly silver, and he got a lot less from it than he was expecting, and had to borrow the cost of a plane ticket home.) Klaus would find the whole script hilarious, which is perhaps the only thing that stops Allison from putting her fist through the hotel's coffee table when she gets to the part about Diego deciding a doll is his best friend, dragging it around wherever he goes, talking to it and treating it like it's alive, even as an adult. And Vanya trails after them all, whining, yearning to be one of them, crying behind a handmade domino mask because their father won't give her one. 

Their father, in the screenplay, is just as much of a shit as he is in real life. Maybe even less of one: Allison hasn't been home in so long that it's hard to tell. But she doesn't really care if the movie hurts _him_. She doesn't think he's capable of feeling hurt, sometimes. Or any other human emotions.

Because the script is calculated to hurt. It's a smear job. Allison eyes the bottle of vodka. She's tempted to pour out another finger or two, or maybe enough to knock her out for the night, but that won't make it any easier. It'll fill her head with nightmares and her hotel bed with sweat, and cloud her morning with a hangover. And hangovers always make her think of Klaus. And it will all hurt too much.

Allison puts the script to the side, puts the bottle away, turns out the light. She has nightmares anyway, and at three in the morning she wakes up, sobbing Luther's name.

In the morning, after the sun has risen, she goes for a run in Griffith Park, going up and down the stairs by the Observatory until her knees are shaking. She showers. She dresses professionally. She gets into her car and drives to the studio that's producing _The Raincoat School._

The head of the studio--technically the head of the studio isn't expecting her, but he should have been from the moment he signed on to the project. Allison settles into the chair on the other side of his desk, and, when asked what he can do for her, she smiles.

"I heard a rumor," she says, "about _The Raincoat School._ "

His eyes go empty and mesmerized.

"I heard a rumor that all the product placements have been pulled," she says. "I heard a rumor there's no funding to be had for it, anywhere. I heard a rumor that the unions will all boycott it. And I heard a rumor that its author, H. Jenkins? Will never work in this industry again."

And with that, she stands up and sweeps out of the room. There's a great little bakery down the block. She's still hungry from her morning run, and they serve hot chocolate French style, in giant bowls you can gulp from and dip your pastries in. Allison has hazy memories of drinking it as a treat when she was a child: one of their nannies was French. She left when Grace came, Allison thinks, or maybe before then. She wonders, briefly, what happened to their ten nannies. No--seven. Seven nannies for seven babies.

The studio executive's blank face flashes in her mind and suddenly, she's not hungry anymore.

**Author's Note:**

> I mock because I love but also, what the actual fuck, comics.


End file.
